so i wanted to play ICEY because you know i may as well i got it in the bundle and refunding it felt like cheating
i wish i had refunded it because it made my blood boil for a good 2-3 hours; here is the rant
THE PREAMBLE:
ICEY is a game that advertises itself as a 2d scrolling action game ala The Dishwasher from the old Xbox 360 store - except it has spooky meta themes. I suspect it was ported from the PS4 to the PC, which ties in with the Steam Link deal. The most glaring piece of stupidity in the hunk of chromosome that is ICEY is the fact that it advertises itself as a game with meta elements. It's Pony Island levels of missing the point. OneShot, a game that hammered you over the head with the fact that it was meta from the outset, was more subtle than this. This will be covered in the Meta part of the rant.
I consider myself okay at 2d action games. I beat Dishwasher: Vampire Smile on hard after about a week or so. I'm not the best either - but the game is either easy as cutting cake or as hard as the concrete I wanted to hit after I jump off a building because of this game.
It is sometimes both in the same fighting sequence.
The game's gameplay is pretty standard as 2d console action games go, with a basic attack, a strong attack, jumping, dash, etc. If you've played or seen The Dishwasher, which I will never stop comparing this game to, you've basically seen what the gameplay is.
The art is beautiful. It's so beautiful they literally reuse the first level 3 times in the later stages. That is not a joke. They take the entire first level, put harder enemies in it, and laid a grainy CRT overlay on it and played it off by going "ICEY noticed this place looked familiar, but it'll be okay as long as she keeps following the arrows."
The game is repetitive as forget. You will be fighting the same enemies as you were from the 3rd stage of the 1st level. One of them doesn't even change. They added a gun to the most basic enemy, and that was the only change they made. They start reusing the early bosses as standard enemies in the fourth-to-last level. The only thing that changes is your capacity to fight them, or in my case, the patience to do so.
The story is generic (perhaps intentionally), with a few twists, a meta element that mostly doesn't mean anything except for a really big paragraph at the end of each sequence, and an underlying theme involving the transferring of minds to digital formats, artificial intelligence, and The King in Yellow, for some reason.
The 'transfer your mind to the digital world' concept isn't taken much further than "they did that, but this guy also did that, go kill him"
The artificial intelligence theme essentially boils down to 'this guy was just a program, but now he's alive and mad! oh, also your waifu came to life but she's sad she can't hug you in the real, so she's going to do something else now.'
The King in Yellow was basically a means to an end of an incredibly contrived puzzle that may or may not have any actual bearing on the lore, universe, or anything at all other than some weird stuff happening. It isn't mentioned at the end, is shoved aside in favor of the 'waifu is alive' deal despite it being one of the most prominent leadups and themes in the entire game up to that point. Nobody talks about it.
Everybody talks up the Black Star, and the King in Yellow. You see both of these things, their worshippers, and even an excerpt of a mockup radio host reading from a passage! It's great! It's a nice leadup! Guess what? Nobody ever talks about it in the real ending. In the 'normal ending', what happens is that the narrator goes 'good job, you killed that guy we wanted dead. icey's gonna maybe do some stuff, i guess,' before the entire screen gets eaten by a giant black circle (presumably the black star from the play).
It's heavily implied that everything is in a 'repitition', a repeat of the universe every time the Black Star arrives and the dude literally sitting at a computer fixes whatever broke with the fix command. This is only mentioned in the lore descriptions to the achievements, mostly for the boss kills. When you forget something up real bad and the narrator gets super upset, he'll sometimes lock you in a room and say 'I'm gonna wait for the Black Star to come now', and then it presumably does as the guy at the computer fixes the 2 liter machine and you go back to the menu.
It's handled incredibly poorly.
PART 1; THE NARRATOR:
forget this guy, seriously. Not even the character, everything about him. The dialogue. The voice acting. The way he's presented even when you're supposedly following his directions is atrocious.
Whoever wrote his dialogue did not go to a writing class and learn how to write in under twenty words or less. He says one sentence that gets his point across, and then mostly shouts the same thing at you for about 2-4 minutes while you wait for him to stop so you can keep playing the game. His voice is grating, has little inflection for how supposedly angry he's supposed to be, and even when you are following his directions to the letter, he'll still make you sit there and listen to him for 2 minutes while you're locked in a room doing nothing.
An example: There is an optional boss - the 2nd to last, actually. He's very difficult - but avoidable, if you don't kill his lover in the previous room. The Narrator demands that you kill his lover; he's very adamant on this point.
So adamant, in fact, that he will yell at you for an actual 3 minutes (i checked) about how you're not following the rules, you never listen to anything he says, and that they have done nothing to help you and you have no reason not to kill this unarmed person. He goes on for another minute of accusing you of being a hypocrite as you won't kill them due to them being 'unarmed' and or a 'woman'. Eventually, he'll just let you go on by. The boss will not fight you if you sit through the Narrator's rant.
Another example is in the room just before the final boss - a constantly reused bland metallic room, in case you were wondering - in which he talks to you about how you've worked so hard to get here, your mission is almost complete, and you're ready to go on. A monitor flickers on, asking you if you're ready with a Yes or No prompt. I was about $40 short of an HP upgrade, so I chose no. What ensued was a 10 minute long rant about disrespect for authority, how stupid you are for not being ready, not following the path set out for you, 4 minutes of him humming classic rock tunes to himself, not a joke, some meta stuff, and then him crying, asking why you're doing this to him, why you treat him this way, and whether or not you watched a video on how to treat you.
His dialogue makes him sound less like a disgruntled developer of a game, less angry, and more like a whiny child - which his presented personality does not match with.
An example of a good narrator is Bastion's narrator. Bastion's narrator had a good voice actor, with good dialogue that provided background information about the world you were in, what you were up against, who the characters were, and often told you this while you were either doing something pertinent to that information or while you were on a nice walk, taking in the scenery of the game.
ICEY's narrator chooses to lock you in a room where you are unable to progress while he yells at you most of the time. Any other time, you have to sit there and wait for him to stop talking in order to choose the option you actually want. Sometimes he'll actually just start humming to himself in an effort to force you to pick the 'wrong' option as a matter of sheer patience.
One could make the argument that most of his 3-8 minute long rants are optional content that you have full license to ignore - at which point, you're missing out on half the game that was even advertised. You also need to go through every single rant to win the true ending, as you need the applicable achievements. Sometimes. I think I broke it a little, once.
PART 2; THE META:
The meta elements aren't subtle, are revealed to you both within the steam page and almost immediantly ingame, and are less 'meta' and more 'Stanley Parable except the narrator is a whiny bitch'.
It wants to be Stanley Parable, but also wants to be a developer commentary, that also wants to be a 2D action game where you don't pay attention to the meta parts, and seems to want to send some kind of message about player ignorance in developmental woes and the ignorance of the industry while also making the same narrator get shot by his wife after sleeping with an art intern and actually making you watch a Chinese pop-singer group named Girl Power's entire music video which lagged immensely as the game probably doesn't run video files all that well, because the narrator spent all the money on trips and dinners.
The only thing truly 'meta' about it is that you're supposedly an observer of some kind, meant to control ICEY the character until she becomes sentient, somehow. It's never explained how she actually does it - she just kind of does when you really need her to. Presumably, it's part of the 'experiment' you're undergoing along with the weird ball thing that follows ICEY around and is more or less a small, insignificant detail added at the tailend of the game that has no impact. ICEY becomes sentient, kills a few monsters, and then sort-of professes her love for you but then laments that she's digital and you're not so you can't hug, essentially. She then forgets off somewhere.
Had the meta parts ignored the entire 'the narrator might be the developer bitching at you' part and just focused on the 'this might be a weird experiment made to make my anime waifus come to life' story, it would've been much better. Especially if the narrator had nothing to do with it. forget the narrator.
PART 3; THE GAMEPLAY, AND REPITITION
I'll admit, I quite enjoyed the game's early parts. New enemies with unique moves that I had to counter were coming in on a regular basis, and I had fun fighting them. It's your standard 'walk into a room, the doors lock, and you've gotta fight some guys' deal. Combat is handled through your basic moves chained into combos - light attack, heavy attack, your standard movement, your dash, as well as the special 'execution' (i call it Taking the L) which recovers your HP and shield for executing an enemy at low HP with a special prompt, as well as your 'overload', which is essentially high damage across the screen that knocks enemies in the air, but only usable after you Take the L. Some enemies require you to Take the L multiple times, mostly minibosses and at times the recycled regular bosses.
The gameplay becomes a slog in the later parts when the enemy types never change barring a few (one of which is literally two of the early enemies stacked on top of eachother) and the game straight up starts to reuse the bosses in the standard waves. The combat never really changes, and only the bosses add any variety - and even then, it's typically more of the same. Your damage output and HP is supplemented by spending cash on the ingame upgrade menu, which allows you to gain a few new combos and upgrade the ones you already had with increased damage. It's essential, as at some point enemies start killing you in one combo - including one scenario where a group of weak enemies chainstunned me up against one of the arena walls and made it impossible to do anything. The game has no real recovery system - if you get hit and don't have a shield (which is, by all means, essentially free HP gained when you Take the L) your ass is getting knocked flat on the ground. You can jump to cut this time in half, but that's it. Most enemies in the later parts block dashing through them or straight up hurt you if you try, so escaping a particularly fierce combo is going to hurt.
The game also has a habit of recycling entire levels. In one chapter. All of the levels before that. Every single one.
The game really likes to play it off by putting a filter over it, something weird like 'ooh the edge of the screen is blurry and kind of dark' or 'ooh the screen looks like a CRT now' and pretend it's a meta thing, when it's really just lazy reusing of assets. At times, they don't even bother switching out the basic enemies in the early levels for something harder. I can understand that proper art is expensive - especially art of this caliber, the backgrounds are often impressive barring the sewer - and that you can't have custom art for every level you want. That is no excuse for the blatant copy-pasting of an entire level into another chapter of the game.
As a side note, I beat the entire game on the Hard difficulty and got all the achievements because I hate fun, myself, and wanted to dispel any possible argument that I hadn't really played the game. I wish I didn't.
CLOSING STATEMENT:
I hate this game.
TL;DR: its dust an elysian tale but worse and also they vomitted some bad stanley parable copy stuff on it and its gross
fun fact: the game actively insults you for being 'one of those people who just play the game for achievements, don't even care about the time and effort put in by the developers, their heart and soul into the game, the story and the gameplay' and then makes you get all of them for the hidden ending
